1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an event revenue management system for forecasting demand for an event and optimizing ticket pricing and allocation based on historical and current data to manage revenue and to maximize profit from the event.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
Generally, ticket prices are fixed and published well before an event takes place. For any event, there are typically several price categories or seat categories associated with it. For each price category, there may also be several discount categories, such as an advance-purchase discount or senior discount.
To maximize profit from each event, it is desirable to better manage the price and availability of ticket sales. For example, it may be desirable to close from sale low margin ticket categories when a section has high demand. It may be desirable to upgrade purchases for an over-subscribed section by filling purchases that would have gone unsold.
Recently, there has been a growing interest in revenue management systems. Revenue management is the science of using past history and current data to manage revenue and profit for various events.
With the rapid advance of computer technology, it is now possible to collect and store a large amount of historical data and track current booking levels. Further, using computers, our abilities to analyze historical and current data have improved significantly.
Yet, existing revenue management systems suffer from many shortcomings. Such shortcomings include: (1) they do not fully take into account factors affecting revenue and profit, such as timing of an event, availability of resources within an event, ancillary revenue, and discount offers available for each resource; (2) they fail to fully utilize historical data including unconstrained historical demand; (3) they do not adequately support user inputs; (4) they do not fully take into account current booking information for future events; and (5) they lack an adequate ticket pricing optimization capability.
Thus, there is a need for an event revenue management system that is capable of effectively analyzing historical and current data to accurately forecast demand for various types of tickets for an event and optimize ticket pricing to manage revenue and maximize profit from the event.